LinkPatrol

As part of our SEJ interview series, David Henzel of MaxCDN joins us to discuss the benefits of using a content delivery network (CDN) to distribute website content.

Why do websites need a CDN? The biggest reason why is to prevent websites from crashing when experiencing a large amount of traffic. David explains how CDNs help to balance the traffic load in the video below:

Here are some key takeaways from the video:

High traffic websites need a CDN in order to scale. For example if you’re suddenly experiencing a large influx of traffic your website might crash. A CDN helps to balance the traffic.

A CDN is made up of servers around the world that host your content, which it then serves to users from various locations.

To give you an idea of how well equipped a CDN is to handle traffic, MaxCDN has hundreds of servers in 15 locations around the world.

There are two types of customers that tend to require the services of a CDN. One type is enterprise customers, like TheNextWeb, and the second type is small bloggers.

A CDN is very easy to implement, especially when using WordPress. There are plenty of plugins out there. like W3 Total Cache, that take only around five minutes to set up.

CDN is useful for high-traffic blogs with worldwide audience. But to be honest, I have seen images etc. loading a lot slower often with CDN compared to local hosting. Almost all websites that I have seen till date that use CDN are hardly any faster than those on their own servers. I still believe that a quality hosting and a good dedicated server is far better than paying for a CDN.